Not long after the initial wave of enthusiasm and revilement surrounding Thomas Piketty’s 2014 bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Jordan Ellenberg described it in the Wall Street Journal as the summer’s most unread book, noting that purchasers of the Kindle edition rarely made it past page 26. Alas, Piketty’s discussion of Honore de Balzac doesn’t start in earnest until a hundred pages in, so many of his would-be readers missed a chance to get acquainted with a writer who feels akin to us despite the nearly two centuries that have passed since his death. His failed poets, fevered mystics, venal financiers, and arrivistes remain vibrant and familiar, and it is pleasant to imagine what Balzac would have made of Ken Bone, Shaun King, or Rudy Giuliani, people who, thanks to the peculiar ways modern media is consumed, already feel more illusory than real.
At the same time, his vast imagined universe, where characters vanish from one novel and reemerge in another and the subplot of one story becomes the axis of the next, is immediately graspable to fans of modern television. A famous episode of The Wire is titled “The Dickensian Aspect,” but that show’s ambition of showing Baltimore from every angle owes much to Balzac’s expansive view of Paris in the 19th century.
Balzac is not a difficult author — his writing is clear and vivid, and he always aims to entertain — but one does, on encountering him, wonder where to begin. No one knows how much he wrote for certain. The most complete edition of his works in French runs to 25,000 pages and excludes much that can reasonably be attributed to him. His masterpiece, The Human Comedy, intended as a comprehensive portrait of the Paris of his time, consists of 91 finished novels and stories and many more drafts. Even allowing for a bit of hyperbole regarding the consistency of Balzac’s vision — he only came up with the title The Human Comedy in 1839, a decade after the first several volumes of it had been written, and not till 1842 did he explain its structure explicitly — a map or guidebook to his work is nearly a must, and it is this that scholar and professor Peter Brooks seeks to provide in Balzac’s Lives, which brings together biographies of nine of The Human Comedy’s major characters.
Keep in mind, this is nine of at least 2,472, so Brooks’s effort is doomed to be quixotic, if not quite impossible. Unwieldy for beginners, a bit superfluous for scholars, Balzac’s Lives will best serve the intermediate Balzacian: someone who has read Pere Goriot, Eugenie Grandet, and Lost Illusions and wants to know what holds them all together. Brooks opens by reminding readers that the extraordinary changes the world experienced in the first half of the 19th century, including the French and American revolutions, the rise of nation-states, the invention of steam power, and industrialization, are responsible for much of what we think of as a character arc and plot. These changes disrupted “assigned identities” and created, for people living at the time, “an uncertain new order where everything seems to be up for grabs, if you can find some way to get the money you need to acquire things, name, reputation, fortune.”
Exemplary of The Human Comedy’s shape-shifting is a figure Balzac described as the “backbone” of the work, a jaded ex-con who first appears in Pere Goriot and pops up again in later volumes under the names Vautrin, Jacques Collin, and Abbe Carlos Herrera, not to mention “death-dodger,” a moniker he got in prison thanks to his ingenuity at avoiding the guillotine. A sardonic man who knows “all about ships, the sea, France, foreign countries, men, business, law, great houses and prisons,” he begins his fictional life in a boarding house, where he encourages a young social climber, Eugene de Rastignac, to court a young woman set to inherit a vast fortune. Only her brother stands in the way, and after declaring “there are no laws save those of expediency,” Vautrin tells Rastignac he has a friend who would be happy to do away with the inconvenient party.
It turns out Vautrin is on the lam, and eventually, the police apprehend him, revealing the brand on his shoulder he received as a forced laborer. At this, Vautrin grows mock-philosophical, railing with newfound passion against the corrupt values of a rotten society. Rastignac takes his lessons to heart, and as the Comedy continues, he marries well and accrues a great deal of power. In The House of Nucingen, we read of him that “he did not believe in any virtue, but rather of circumstances in which man is virtuous.” For his part, Vautrin goes on to mentor, badly, Lucien de Rubempre, hero of Lost Illusions, and after his maneuverings lead the young man to commit suicide, he turns informant, later rising to chief of police. In these men’s opportune changes of principle in pursuit of triumph, Balzac anticipates not only Sigmund Freud’s concept of the drive for mastery but also the great Austrian American psychologist Walter Mischel, whose research in the 1960s questioned the very notion that people possessed a single, definable personality that persisted over time.
For Brooks, Balzac’s society is no longer “an organic and hierarchical whole” but instead “the struggle of individual egos with no unifying vision.” The weapon of choice in this struggle is cash. Balzac was a student of financial stratagems, in part because he was chronically in debt, and his recognition of the centrality of wealth to social life is bracing for American readers, who, despite the advent of interest-only mortgages and trillion-dollar valuations, have had few writers since Louis Auchincloss capable of writing knowledgeably about money. Most of Balzac’s heroes are on the make, his plots revolve around inheritances, titles, fortunes, and moneymaking schemes, and he virtually invents the stereotype of the all-powerful financier with the usurer Gobseck, one of the “silent and unknown kings” of Parisian society. In contrast with the heroic subjects of Balzac’s contemporaries Alexandre Dumas and Sir Walter Scott, Gobseck is a man who does nothing. His riches multiply without intervention, divorced from any moral value save obedience to the law, the chief purpose of which (as Balzac often repeats) is to protect men like Gobseck.
In 1989, Tom Wolfe invoked Balzac in “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” a spirited and often-mocked defense of realism, and warned that if novelists spurned the grit and grime of everyday experience in favor of self-regarding experimentation, their chosen genre would cease to matter to the majority of readers. His admonition seems quaintly optimistic today, when the average American apparently reads no more than 16 minutes per day. The novel doesn’t feel done to me, and there are many honorable exceptions to the cliche that new fiction is either schlock or highbrow piffle. Still, Stefan Beck was right to declare in these pages that it’s “a serious problem for contemporary literature that so few of our writers have directly experienced the ugliest side of life.” Brooks makes a convincing argument that there is much to learn in Balzac for anyone willing to buck the trend.
Adrian Nathan West is a literary translator, critic, and the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation.
